“Oh, we’re with the groom’s family,” I quickly covered.
“Right. Of course.” She turned to her keyboard again, tapping away until a screen with Mitsy’s name popped up. Beatrice lifted her glasses to her nose and squinted up at it. “The last item she logged was from the fine china department.” She stood up and gestured the opposite way we’d come in. “It’s through barware there and to the right. Mitsy’s the lovely young brunette. Long hair, and I believe she’s wearing pink today. She’s with her mother, in Chanel. You can’t miss them.”
“Thanks,” I said, as we followed her lead through rows of tinted martini glasses and fine champagne flutes.
Just to the right were the displays of china plates, teacups with dainty saucers, and delicate little sugar bowls. All in various floral patterns – lilies, roses, green snaking vines. It was a veritable Eden of dinnerware.
And smack in the middle were the Kleinburgs.
As Beatrice had promised, they were hard to miss. Not that a Chanel suit and a brunette stood out in Bloomingdales. But the volume of their conversation did.
“Marion Lester has the Rose of India pattern. I will not have the same pattern as Marion Lester.”
“Well, this one is hideous. What will people say when you serve them on something so pedestrian?”
“Royal Rose is a modern pattern. I’m not serving dinner on some old lady ware. And certainly not the same one Marion Lester has!”
“Well, what about Ivy and Rose?”
“Snoozeville.”
“Ivy and Rose is a perfectly respectable china pattern.”
“For the near dead!”
“Um, Mitsy?” I asked, coming up behind the pair.
Mitsy spun on me. “What?” she barked.
While her tone was abrasive enough to make me jump, there was no denying Mitsy was a lovely girl. Smooth skin touched with just the right amount of time in a tanning booth, lips any collagen devotee would die for, and long, sleek, brown hair that fell well past her shoulders in a perfectly layered cut that was both trendy and classic all at once.
Maybe money couldn’t buy happiness, but, in this case, it could sure buy good looks.
“Hi, I’m Maddie.” I stuck a hand out toward her.
She gave it a bland so-what stare.
“I’m a fashion designer. I, uh,… worked with Gigi,” I said, sticking with the same story I’d spun her father.
Again with the so-what stare. Gee, a big talker, huh?
Luckily, her mom had the society manners thing down pat. “We were both just so shocked to hear about Gigi,” she said, putting a hand to her heart as if the very thought may make it beat right out of her chest. “What a horrible incident.”
Somehow the word ‘incident’ made the whole thing sound like a missed luncheon or quarrel with the dry cleaner over stubborn stain. It sanitized all emotion out of the equation. Which, I decided as I watched Mrs. Kleinburg, I’d bet is just what she meant for it to do.
“Yes, horrible,” I echoed. “You were a client of hers?” I asked, turning to Mitsy again.
“I was. But I fired her,” she responded, sticking her chin up in the air.
“Oh?”
“Yes, she was impossible. I mean, she said she would give me my dream wedding. Those were her exact words. ‘Dream wedding.’ Then whenever I asked for something, she couldn’t deliver.”
“Really?” I asked. “Anything specific she didn’t deliver on?”
“God, everything!” Mitsy rolled her brown eyes toward the ceiling. “First she said we couldn’t change the flowers this close to the wedding, even though I pointed out that they would now clash with the new color we picked out for the bridesmaid dresses. Then she said the Italian pastry chef I wanted to do my cake wouldn’t fly in from Milan to bake it. Then there was the whole orchestra disaster.”
“Orchestra?”
“Yeah, I wanted a nine-piece orchestra. Gigi said the reception hall we’d booked could only accommodate five. So, I told her to find a new place. Well, of course she went up in arms saying it was too late to book the size venue we needed. But the last straw was when I was supposed to meet with her at the church to discuss the ceremony arrangements and she totally blew me off. Canceled at the last minute.”
“When was this?”
“Saturday.”
“The day before she died?” Dana piped up.
“Yes. Why do you ask?” Mrs. Kleinburg stepped in, eyeing Dana and I. Apparently she wasn’t as open as Mitsy with her dirty laundry.
“Well… we just want to make sure that this sort of thing doesn’t happen again with your new planner.” I cringed. I was not the world’s best liar and I had a bad feeling the more fibs I told, the sooner they’d come back to bite me in the butt. But in for a penny, in for a pound.
Mitsy nodded vigorously. “Thank you! I’ve gained two and a half pounds from the stress! I need someone who is way less pain in the ass.”
“Mitsy. Language,” her mother said, visibly flinching.
“Had she ever missed an appointment with you before?” I asked. With the way Gigi had emphasized the importance of an organized schedule to her assistant, I had a hard time picturing her forgetting a client meeting.
Mitsy shook her head. “Never. She told me something had come up at the last minute.”
“Hmm.” I wondered if that something had anything to do with her death the following morning. “She didn’t happen to say what had come up, did she?”
“No. She sent me a text, so she didn’t elaborate. Just, ‘unavoidable’ and ‘terribly sorry.’” Mitsy snorted as if she didn’t believe it. “Old hag probably needed an emergency Botox or something.”
“Mitsy,” her mother chided again.
“Anyway, I was so done with her after that,” she said
I made a mental note to ask Allie about it later. Maybe it was wrinkle related, but then again, maybe not. Unexplained absences the day before the victim’s death were the things those Law & Order guys salivated over.
“Hey, which pattern do you like?” Mitsy asked, gesturing to a row of plates. “Royal Rose, Rose of India or Ivy and Rose?”
I looked down. All three plates had a yellow background spotted with red roses. I squinted hard, trying to see some difference among them. “Umm… Royal Rose?”
Mitsy gave her mother a smug I-told-you-so look. “See?”
Mrs. Kleinburg looked hardly convinced. “Well, it was lovely to meet you,” she said, clearly not meaning it at all.
“Thanks. And same to you,” I said, giving a nod Mitsy’s direction.
She shot me a wan smile, then turned back to her china.
As Dana and I made our way out of the breakables section I watched Mitsy from behind. While she was clearly a nightmare client, I had a hard time putting her in the role of murderer. She seemed more the type to hire out that sort of unpleasantness. Besides, if she had really fired Gigi on Saturday like she said, I didn’t see the motive in it.
Then again, I only had her word that Gigi had missed the appointment at all. I wondered if Allie could confirm it. While I’d asked her for Gigi’s schedule, I hadn’t thought at the time to ask if Gigi had actually kept to it.
“Which pattern did you pick?” Dana asked, pulling me out of my thoughts as we stepped outside.
I shrugged. “Honestly, all those roses looked the same to me.”
“No, silly, not just now. I mean which china pattern did you and Ramirez pick out?”
“Oh. We didn’t.”
Dana stopped in her tracks as we passed The Gap, grabbing my arm in a vise grip. “Seriously? You didn’t pick a china pattern?”
“Um. No?”
“Well what are guests supposed to give you?”
“Um… regular plates?”
She shook her head, giving me a look like I’d just suggested Dixie cups.
“Look, we’re not really the china type of people,” I explained. “I mean, it’s not like we’re giving Kleinburg style dinn
er parties. Most days it’s takeout pizza.”
“Maddie it’s not for you.”
“O-kaaaaay. Then it’s for…?”
Dana shook her head at me, silently giving off the ‘you’re hopeless’ vibe. “You’re supposed to pick out a china pattern when you get married so that everyone can buy you that stuff for your wedding, then you can put it in a curio, where your children will admire it their whole lives, and you can leave it to them when you die so they’ll always have that reminder of your wedding day.”
I stared. “Um. Right. That makes total sense now.”
Dana sighed. “Oh, well.” She linked her arm through mine and propelled me toward the parking garage. “At least there’s always your anniversary. You know, it’s never too early to start registering for that.”
Lord help me.
* * *
By the time I got back to my studio the sun was just starting to set over the water, creating one of those picture postcard perfect California moments as vibrant oranges and pinks melted into the deep aqua horizon. I wistfully sighed at the thought I’d soon be coming home to a nice little suburban pad instead of my ocean-side escape. Not that I was knocking living with Ramirez. The stay three-nights-at-my-house-then-I’ll-stay-three-nights-at-yours thing we’d been doing the last few months since returning from Paris was a pain in the butt. More than once I’d had the perfect outfit picked out only to realize I’d left that pair of shoes in his closet.
But there was some tiny part of me that, despite how happy I was merging from a Me to an Us, was going to miss Me’s view.
I parked my Jeep in the drive and trudged up the flight of stairs, happy to see a light on under the door. Amazingly, Ramirez had beaten me home. I slipped my key in the lock, turning the handle to find my guy standing at the kitchen counter hunkered over a bowl of Frosted Flakes.
He raised his head, licking milk from his lower lip. “Hey.”
“Hey. You’re home early,” I said, planting a kiss at the corner of his mouth. Mmm. Kellogg’s flavored. Yum.
“Just came by to change my clothes.”
“Oh. Right.” I tried to hide my disappointment.
“You’re disappointed.”
Hey, I didn’t say I tried hard.
“No, it’s fine,” I lied. “I understand.”
“Hmm,” he said. But let it go. “Another box came.” He gestured to the coffee table. A brown, rectangular package almost as long as the table itself.
Despite feeling just a little frustrated that Ramirez’s plans for the evening didn’t include spooning with me while we watched American Idol, an unopened gift always lifted my spirits.
I checked the return address. My grandmother.
In a large Irish Catholic family there is no greater sin than being single. At every family gathering since I started menstruating, my grandmother regaled me with stories of how she’d had nine children before the age of thirty. As I marched through my twenties unmarried, the stories turned from tales of my ancestors to warnings that my ovaries were drying up like little barren prunes.
Which is why Grandmother had actually fallen to her knees, grabbed her rosary, and said a prayer of thanks when I’d shown her my engagement ring. Her last single grandchild was finally tying the knot. And to a good Catholic boy no less. (Okay, a Catholic boy at any rate. The jury was still out on the “good” part.)
I grabbed my scissors and dug into the package, ripping away tape and fishing around in the layers of packing peanuts until I came away with a soft bundle wrapped in pink tissue paper.
“What’s that?” Ramirez asked around a bite of flakes.
“I don’t know.” I untied the pink ribbon, and out fell a white lacy dress. Size zero. And no, not as in supermodel zero. I mean zero. As in zero-to-three-months baby sized. Underneath it sat a tiny white bonnet with lacy frills down the side and a pair of matching booties.
I looked up at Ramirez, horror bubbling in my throat. “I-I think it’s a Christening outfit.”
He coughed, choking on his cereal. “A what?”
“A Christening outfit. For a baby.”
“Why would she give us that?” He froze. “Wait, you’re not pregnant, are you?”
“No!”
He let out a long sigh. “Jesus, don’t scare me like that.”
“My grandmother’s just a little… overanxious.” I turned the frilly outfit over in my hands. “You think maybe we should have registered for china?”
Ramirez gave me a blank look.
“Never mind.” I shoved the box into the corner next to my crystal duck gravy boat. Did my family know how to do gifts or what?
“So, when are you coming home?” I asked, purposely changing the subject.
“I probably won’t be back until late. We’ve got some leads to follow tonight.”
I raised one eyebrow. “Oh?”
Ramirez gave me a warning look. Then stuffed an oversize mound of flakes in his mouth, crunching down with purpose.
“Oh, come on. I’m good at this stuff. I could help,” I said, rushing on while his mouth was too full to argue. “In fact, I’ll bet I know something you don’t know about Gigi.”
He paused midchew. Then narrowed his eyes at me and swallowed loudly.
“Please don’t tell me Lucy and Ethel have been on the case again?”
“We prefer Cagney and Lacy. But, yes, as a matter of fact we have.”
Ramirez shook his head and muttered something in Spanish under his breath.
“What was that?”
“You don’t want to know,” he responded.
He was right, I probably didn’t.
“Do you want to hear what we learned or not?”
He turned around, abandoning his cereal, and crossed his arms over his chest, leaning back against the counter with an assessing stare. “Okay. Shoot, Cagney.”
“Ha ha. Very funny.” But I filled him in on everything I’d learned so far from Allie, Mitsy, and Summerville.
His bad-cop poker face remained firmly in place until I got to the part about Dana and me ambushing Summerville in his office.
“Wait,” he said, holding up one hand. “Are you telling me that you told Seth Summerville you were working with the police?”
“Um, well, technically Dana told him that. But I’m pretty sure he didn’t believe it.”
He shook his head and started muttering in Spanish again.
“Quit doing that. At least swear at me in a language I can understand.”
“Maddie, these are high-profile people with high-profile lawyers and short fuses. You can’t just go impersonating an officer like that. You know how much trouble you could get into? If he pushed it, you could get arrested for something like this.”
I bit my lip. I hadn’t actually thought about that.
“Not to mention,” he continued, picking up steam now, “piss a lot of people off. You know what happens when you go prying into people’s personal lives?”
“Um, I figure out their motives and eventually find the killer?”
He shook his head. “You end up getting shot at, stabbed, kidnapped, drugged…” He ticked off on his fingers. “Do I need to go on?”
No, he didn’t. Because I couldn’t argue that all of those things had, indeed, happened to me. “But you have to admit, it’s always led to the killer before. Without me, who knows if you’d have solved those cases,” I countered instead.
He did a laugh-slash-snort thing. “I think I would have managed.”
“So, what, you’re saying I’ve never been any help to your cases before?”
“Maddie, you are not a police officer. You are a fashion designer. You draw little shoe pictures all day.”
My turn to narrow my eyes. “You make it sound as if I use crayon. I’ll have you know designing shoes is very hard work. It takes a lot of skill and years of training. Not to mention the business savvy it takes to get your own line going. Not just anyone can do it.”
Ramirez rolled his eyes.<
br />
“I saw that!”
“Fine. I’m sure drawing shoes-”
“Designing shoes,” I corrected him. Loudly, I might add.
Another eye roll. “Fine, designing shoes, is very hard, very important work.”
“Now you’re just being sarcastic.”
He threw his hands up in the air. “What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to say that what I do is every bit as challenging as what you do.”
He cocked his head to the side, a smirk playing at his lips.
He wasn’t going to say it.
I could feel adrenalin pumping through my veins, every feminist bone in my body rankling. Okay you wanna play hard ball, pal? Fine. Let’s play.
“Okay, you think anyone can do my job? Let’s see you do it?”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. I bet you that I’m better at police work than you are at designing shoes.”
“Oh, you do, do you?”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “Yep.”
He shook his head as the smirk turned into a full bodied grin. “Okay, what do you have in mind, Springer?”
“You let me investigate Gigi’s death-”
He opened his mouth to protest.
“-without impersonating any officers.”
Reluctantly, he shut it with a click.
“At the same time, you have to design a pair of high heels. If the heels are fab, you’ve proven your point. But if I catch Gigi’s killer, I win and you have to admit that what I do takes skills, and you actually have respect for my intellect.”
Something flickered behind his eyes. “You know I respect you, Maddie.”
“I ‘draw little shoe pictures’? Yeah, right. I’m feeling the admiration in big steaming piles.”
He bit the inside of his cheek and cocked his head to one side, unable to come up with a decent rebuttal to that one.
Finally he said, “And exactly what do I get if I win?”
Damn. I hadn’t thought that far.
“What do you want?”
His faced morphed from doubtful to devilish in seconds flat, a wicked smile dancing in his eyes.
“Oh no. No way am I making a bet for sexual favors,” I said, quickly shutting those unspoken thoughts down.
High Heels Mysteries Boxed Set (Books 1-5) Page 110
